Posts from February 2007

February 28, 2007

Estonian Composer Arvo Part Wins Sonning Music Prize, Denmark's Top Music Award

COPENHAGEN— Estonian composer Arvo Part won the 2008 Sonning Music Prize, Denmark's top music award, for works that are "rich in spiritual overtones," the prize committee said Tuesday.

Part, 71, will receive the $105,938 award, which is announced a year in advance, during a concert in Copenhagen on May 22, 2008.

Educated at the academy of music in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, Part studied European medieval and Renaissance music. He then "found his own style characterized by beauty and simplicity," the committee said.

"With music rich in spiritual overtones, Arvo Part is one of the most original voices of our time in the international world of music," the awards committee said in its citation.

Estonia must curb the discriminatory powers of the country’s language proficiency watchdog, Amnesty International said. In a letter to Estonia’s Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, the organization’s Secretary General Irene Khan today called the government’s Language Inspectorate "repressive and punitive in nature" and "counter-productive in promoting social integration and social cohesion."

The Inspectorate was established in 1998 under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education. It monitors Estonian language proficiency of the employed population, issuing certificates and determining the minimum fluency levels required by law. To this end, the Inspectorate carries out both announced and unannounced monitoring, including visits to work places.

Irene Khan’s letter is in response to the amendments of the Law on Language, introduced earlier this month and taking effect on 1 March this year which extend the powers of the Language Inspectorate to recommending dismissals of employees for insufficient Estonian language skills, making people who already have a language certificate re-sit a language exam and nullifying the language certificates of those who fail a re-sit of their language exam.

"These amendments mean that people belonging to linguistic minorities will be in an even more vulnerable position on the labour market," Irene Khan said in her letter.

February 27, 2007

TALLINN - Commander of Estonian Defense Forces, General-Major Ants Laaneots relieved on Tuesday the head of the military intelligence branch from his duties following allegations of spying on government officials.

The General Staff of the Defense Forces said Monday that Major Riho Uhtegi has been transferred to cadre reserve "due to service demands," but experts believe his dismissal is directly related to recent reports in the media that the Estonian military intelligence had been involved in "illegal activities."

Estonian newspaper Eesti Ekspress reported last week that military intelligence officers have been spying on defense ministry's staff and made attempts to recruit informers among officers, politicians and journalists.

General Laaneots and Defense Minister Jurgen Ligi have ordered an investigation into the activities of the country's military intelligence, demanding the personal relations between defense ministry officials be examined.

Eesti Ekspress has been published since September 1989 and is the flagship of Estonian investigating journalism. The journalists at Eesti Ekspress have won the investigative journalism award - the Bonnier Award - on numerous occasions.

February 26, 2007

* Estonia’s Independence Day parade was cancelled due a cold snap that delivered temperatures of -17 degree Celsius to Tallinn.

It was the first time since Estonia’s 16 years of independence that the parade was cancelled. Many Estonians were surprised by the official decision, given that parades have been held in previous years in equally frosty conditions.

Defence force commander Major General Ants Laaneots said he made the decision to cancel the parade in the interest of the troops, who would be unable to march in the cold conditions.

He said he consulted the president and prime minister before ordering the cancellation.

* Lithuanian officials, angered by Russia’s halting of oil supplies to the country, have said that they may join Poland in blocking talks on a new EU-Russia agreement.

Transneft, Russia's state-controlled pipeline operator, shut the Druzhba link to Mazeikiu Nafta, the only refinery in the Baltic states, following a reported leak last July. There has been speculation that Russia may be using the blockage to lower the value of Mazeikiu, and in this way encourage Poland’s PKN Orlen, which beat Russian rivals to take over the plant, to abandon its acquisition of the refinery.

Deputy Foreign Minister Zygimantas Pavilionis told Reuters that he would like the issue to be discussed at the upcoming European Council meeting on 8-9 March saying, "We think that the EU should influence the process. We have asked the (EU) presidency, but nothing has happened." He further questioned Russia's motives: "The leak can be fixed in several weeks, but eight months have passed already and nothing has happened. It is a political act."

Transneft told Kommersant that an examination of the pipeline is ongoing and that supplies would not be resumed earlier than March 2007. In the eventuality that the pipeline cannot be repaired, the construction of a new one might take up to two years.

February 25, 2007

In a case which may have implications for all of Eastern Europe, on Feb. 22 Estonian President Toomas Hendrick Ilves vetoed legislation that had called for the removal of a Soviet war memorial erected in 1947.

Under pressure from his own party and the Russian government, President Ilves had announced that he would not sign the bill even as it was working its way through the Estonian legislature earlier this month. The bill will now go back to Parliament, which has threatened to override the presidential veto.

Should that happen, the Estonian Supreme Court will likely get a chance to review the constitutionality of the legislation. When and if the matter reaches them, the members of the Supreme Court will be asked not only to rule on the constitutionality of the proposed law, but also to provide a governmentally-sanctioned interpretation of history.

At the center of the conflict is a large statue known as the Bronze Soldier, which has stood for decades near a small cemetery in the heart of Tallinn, the capital city. Arguments over the meaning of the statute have been ongoing inside Estonia, and on the internet, for years.

The monument was originally built as a memorial to honor the sacrifices and accomplishments of the Soviet Red Army, which entered Estonia in 1944. The Soviets felt that they were liberating the country from a Nazi puppet-government that had been installed in 1941.

TALLINN-- Celebrations marking Estonia's Independence Day began with state flag raising in a ceremony at dawn this Saturday.

The tradition of flag hoisting was started on February 24, 1918. The flag was raised several hours before the German invasion.

The Estonian flag was raised again over Tallinn only two years ago, in 1920, when the peace treaty with Soviet Russia was signed. It was the first act of international recognition of the sovereign state. The treaty allowed Estonia to come out of the war.

The winter has impeded the traditional sequence of celebration events this year. For the first time since the independence regaining in 1992, a military parade was not held. It was canceled because of the severe frost.

The traditional reception also for the first time will take place outside Tallinn, but not in the city. The Estonian president decided to hold it in Tartu.

The intention was clear from the opening look of the Ferre 2007 women’s ready-to-wear collection shown Friday in Milan, when a dashing redhead Celtic male model made the opening passage in the show in super slim dandy's suit.

Tailoring - taut, innovative, rigorous and yet highly extravagant - was the key to this collection by designer Gianfranco Ferre.

This designer may cut his pants pencil slim, but his blousons have two-foot wide cuffs; he may finish his show with the model of his latest ad campaign, funk singer Skin, wearing a knit vest, but the garment is composed of 1.5 million in high quality diamonds.

Whatever else you can say about the Ferre gal, Gianfranco clearly believes she likes plenty of options. So the designer frequently sends on many variations of the same theme. One elegantly cut pinstripe dress worn by “veteran” model Carmen Kass, was followed by an almost exact copy, except the second look was composed of shaved astrakhan.

* The supervisory board of the Tallinn Stock Exchange approved Andrus Alber as Chairman of the Management Board of the Tallinn Stock Exchange.

Andrus Alber was born in 1971. He completed Kadriorg German Upper Secondary School, graduated from the Faculty of Economics of the Tallinn University of Technology and obtained a Master’s level degree in International Relations (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA).

Andrus Alber has dedicated a great part of his career, so far, to the Bank of Estonia. In 2000–2001 he was Economic Counsellor to the President of the Republic of Estonia ; in 2001–2003 he was Advisor to the Executive Director for the Nordic-Baltic Constituency of the IMF. Before his election as the Chairman of the Management Board of the Tallinn Stock Exchange, Alber worked as Advisor to the President of the Bank of Estonia.

* Finnish businessman Markus Pasi Pönkä, 23, was sentenced in Tallinn's District Court on Monday to 12 years' imprisonment for the murder of his 22-year-old associate. The case from December 2005 attracted much attention at the time for its grisly nature : the victim's body was cut up and wrapped in plastic sacks after the killing. The convicted man announced immediately that he would be appealing the sentence.

After the sentence is formally put into effect, Pönkä will be transported to prison in Finland, where he may be facing new charges. He is suspected of having acquired money via a fake invoicing scam (see attached article) that involved membership in a charitable organisation. According to the charge presented in Estonia, Pönkä shot his colleague in order to keep all the money unlawfully gained from the Finnish scam, and in order to remove one significant and potentially damaging witness to the fraud. The convicted man has denied that the murder was premeditated. He has claimed the killing was in self-defence and the cutting up of the body was an act carried out while in shock. While he was held in custody he repeatedly and unsuccessfully sought bail against guarantees, and complained of police violence at the time of his arrest, shortly before the victim's body was discovered.

SYDNEY : Kanal 2 Estonia has acquired from Southern Star International seasons 16 to 20 of Home & Away and seasons 4 to 8 of McLeod’s Daughters, as well as securing a five-year output deal with the Australian distributor.

Produced by the Seven Network Australia, Home & Away has been sold into more than 50 countries with an estimated worldwide audience of over 50 million. The series follows the lives and loves of the residents of Summer Bay and has served as the launching pad for international celebrities that include Heath Ledger, Guy Pearce, Julian McMahon, Melissa George and Naomi Watts.

Produced by Millennium Television and Nine Films and Television for the Nine Network Australia, McLeod’s Daughters is now in its seventh year on air and has been sold into over 230 territories worldwide.

Igor Ivask, from Tartu in Southern Estonia, is one of the thousands of Estonian construction workers who have come to find work in Finland. But things are changing: the wage-level in Estonia is heading upwards and there have been adjustments to the taxation of foreign rental labour in Finland. The belief now is that some of those Estonian construction crews will stay at home and find work on sites in their own country. Ivask has worked in Finland on large construction projects and on private detached house building sites alike.

He did his first tiling and parquet flooring jobs in Finland through an Estonian manpower rentals company. This proved to be a short stint, since the company didn't stick to its promises. "When two-thirds of the salary went to other hands, there really wasn't much sense in doing the work", he recalls.

The competitiveness council backed a Commission proposal on 18 February 2007 to slash administrative burdens in existing EU regulations by 25% over five years, but refused to set a similar target at national level.

Administrative burdens imposed by governments (in the form of paperwork and statistical obligations) amount to around 3.5% of EU GDP, according to Commission estimates.

In November 2006, Enterprise and Industry Commissioner Günter Verheugen proposed setting a legally binding target for cutting such administrative costs by 25%, saying that this could produce a €150 billion boost to the European economy (EurActiv 16/11/06).

The aim is to give fresh impetus to efforts to simplify and improve the EU regulatory environment.

Although the 27 ministers in charge of competitiveness backed the Commission's proposed goal of cutting Community red tape by 25% before 2012, the idea of setting binding targets at national level was discarded.

Despite widespread support from front runners, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, which have already embarked on ambitious schemes to simplify their business regulation, other member states remained reluctant to commit to such an ambitious target for their national rules.

They pointed to the high costs of measuring the burdens related to existing and new regulations and to the difficulties of defining criteria for cutting administrative burdens.